The experts keep getting it wrong on Ukraine. So what should we believe?

Whom should you believe about the outcome of Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine?

Two-and-a-half years ago, the Russians looked invincible. Then, after losing most of Kharkiv and Kherson provinces, they looked incompetent and the Ukrainians appeared invincible. Then the Ukrainian counter-offensive led nowhere and it was Russia’s turn once again to look like a winner.

Then the war seemed like a stalemate, prompting many to say it would never end.

But a few weeks ago, the Ukrainians launched a surprise attack against Kursk Province, and the discourse immediately changed. For many, the incursion was a game-changer that heralded Ukrainian victory. Others said it heralded nothing. One political scientist called it a “major strategic blunder,” and another a “major strategic error.”

So, who’s right? We don’t know. The international relations experts and security specialists were wrong about the Feb. 24, 2022, Russian invasion, expecting it to be a cakewalk for the Russian army, and that they were caught flatfooted by the Kursk incursion, expecting the war to drag on without any dramatic breakthroughs. Average human beings cannot be blamed for concluding that the experts really aren’t all that expert, at least not when it comes to predictions.

Hence the renewed interest in black-swan events. These supposedly unpredictable, very low-probability events have an extremely important role to play in shoddy theorizing, because they salvage broken theories and explain why predictions fail.

Imagine you claimed that something would happen, and then it didn’t. What to do? You could say you’re wrong (heaven forbid!), but how much better to blame it all on some poor black swan that just came out of nowhere, like a bolt out of the blue, and got in the way. Then you can claim you would have been right, had not that darn swan shown up and caused havoc.

In real life, black swans exist independently of our thinking about them. (Indeed, I saw two swimming lazily in a pond some 10 miles west of Kyiv a few years ago — little did they know they were causing endless theoretical trouble by their presence!) When it comes to predictive theories, however, the black swans that intervene don’t have an independent existence. They just happen to be those things that a theory is unwilling to countenance.

Academics, experts and analysts do get things right — some of the time. But no one can claim to be in the possession of the theoretical truth. Those who believe they’ve discovered a “theory of everything” — such as international relations “realists” — have in fact discovered theories of nothing or of very little. Dogmatism is a sign of an unfounded belief in one’s omniscience and infallibility.

Marxism is a great example of this. The theory didn’t predict what it claimed it could. Marxist revolutions took place not in the industrialized Western European states with large proletariats, but in the agricultural economies of Eastern Europe, where the working class was minuscule.

That should have killed Marxism, except that it didn’t, thanks in large part to Vladimir Lenin’s discovery of the black swan of imperialism. This supposedly enabled the West European capitalists to survive their domestic economic crises and put off the revolution by seeking markets abroad.

Working-class uprisings against the communists in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 20th Century should have ended Marxism as well. Once again, a black swan came to the rescue of the theory: these states didn’t really practice “true” socialism, it was claimed, so no wonder their working classes tired of oppressive rule by omnipotent Communist Party bureaucracies.

And then just about every socialist country abandoned socialism between 1989 and 1991. If anything qualified as a complete discrediting of Marxism, surely this was it. Except yet again, the dogmatists had an out — the black swan of globalization and the growing chasm between rich and poor, both internationally and domestically, came to the rescue of their discredited theory.

Black swans allow theories to keep living long after their time. But black swans also provide a means of evaluating predictive theories. If they’re saved by too many black swans, they’re probably lousy. If they work, however imperfectly, without the intervention of these swans, they’re probably okay.

Not great, not “the Truth,” but reasonable.

Which brings us back to the Ukraine war. As you listen to the experts predict the success or failure of Ukraine’s “special military operation” in Kursk, always ask yourself: Which theories generated their predictions and, by extension, what may qualify as the black swans that could save them? And which experts have had too many encounters with and been rescued by swans? You may discover that grains of salt are the best way to keep the swans at bay.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”